Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission

Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage

Deborah Withers

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783483525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission argues that despite the prevalence of generational narratives within feminism, the technical processes through which knowledge is transmitted across generations remain unexplored.
Taking Bernard Stiegler's concept of the already-there as its starting point the book considers how the politics of transmission operates within digital culture. It argues that it is necessary to re-orient feminism's political project within what is already-there so that it may respond to an emergent feminist tradition.
Grounded in the author's work collecting and interpreting the music-making heritage of the UK Women's Liberation Movement, it explores how digital technologies have enabled empassioned amateurs to make 'archives' within the first decade of the 21 st century.
The book reflects on what is technically and politically at stake in the organization and transmission of digital artifacts, and explores what happens to feminist cultural heritage when circuits shut down, stall or become diverted.

1

Feminism’s Already-There?

This book is concerned with feminism’s already-there and explores how these resources can be accessed, preserved and cared for through practices of selection, organisation and transmission. As stated in the introduction, the already-there is our key concept that will orient thinking actions as we move through the book. The already-there enables us to think through and account for the role exteriorised, technical memory resources perform in the formation of knowledge, identities and culture. Considering feminism’s already-there enables us to respond to feminism as an epistemic, cultural and political field defined by generations yet simultaneously inattentive to the technical processes through which memory resources are transmitted across generations. It is these processes that must be thought through, and attendant practices developed, as we elaborate a feminist politics of transmission.

How then are we to recognise the already-there? The already-there operates as a technical compost, an arena of composition and decomposition from which ideas, practices, knowledges and techniques emerge and diverge through dynamic processes of transformation, becoming, disintegration and solidification. The already-there is a stratified constellation of technical memory matter, composed of resources that shape political and cultural imaginaries. This stratification should not be thought of merely as across, but also in terms of depth, height, scale, extensiveness and duration. Entities within the already-there are capable of moving in different directions, and can sometimes move through materials such as concrete, bodies and metal. Sometimes what is already-there makes material vibrate or change consistency or temperature corresponding to the terms of its operability. Its forms may change and content migrate, accruing or shedding textures in the process. To access what is already-there is to operationalise it, to put it into use and action. Such activations cannot be valued as inherently positive or negative—all kinds of ideas and actions can be mobilised from within the already-there. The already-there includes material artifacts such as books, monuments, pamphlets, paintings, photographs, film and music. The already-there can also be embodied and gestural, comprising techniques that are kept alive deliberately or by chance—contingency, accidents and planning shape its existence, and relational access to it.

The already-there is spatial, temporal, fibrous, liquid, resonant, electronic, mechanical, inscribed, geophysical,1 deep, aquatic,2 shallow, mineral, metal, wooden, computational, inauthentic, modifying and plastic. In varied forms it transmits, forgets and disintegrates, betraying resilience and vulnerability. There are cultural, economic and governmental strategies that aim to control what is already-there and monitor the effects of encounters that emerge from within it. There are always contingencies at play in its operation, and therefore the possibility of transformation as well as reaction to its contents. The mnemonic technical organs that compose the already-there are collected and sometimes catalogued for ease of reference and coherency, but they can equally be dispersed, hidden or displaced and not form part of any recognisable story or collection. Such ‘unofficial’ annals of the already-there are not necessarily lost forever—they can be reclaimed by individuals, communities, institutions and governments who may care enough to reinvigorate access to them at a historical time amenable to their articulation.3 Furthermore, such dynamics of disappearance and reappearance cannot always be anticipated in advance, or always appear as the result of intentional reclamation.

Even as we acknowledge the pliable contingency of the already-there, what we find already-there can be rigid, established and organised in deliberate ways. It is not an amorphous mass that is indeterminable; it is technical although it may seem intangible. The already-there composes the ground through which actions, social lives, relationships and identities emerge across different historical contexts; it is the locus from which transgenerational responsibility is supported and practiced. What is already-there acts as the very condition for thinking itself: exteriorised technical inscriptions that support and compose the movement of thought, resources from which ideas, lives, politics, desire and culture are woven. Yet what is already-there is not straightforwardly cumulative. It does not automatically become richer as traditions are created, recorded or documented; it belies progression and is oriented in the everywhere. Such a deep archive may exist in the already-there in terms of material volume, as years pass and collections swell—but it may not always be accessible, either in content or in form. What emerges through the already-there in one historical moment may disappear in another. This may be for a variety of reasons including active suppression, accident, technological obsolescence or neglect. The already-there functions across varied layers of access conditioned by technical systems that filter what can be already-there; by the cultural, economic and political context in which what is already-there is valued, dismissed, represented, interpreted, modified or policed; and finally by people struggling to compose themselves within the already-there’s cavernous infinitude. Residing within the already-there’s compositional role, shaping social worlds and imaginations, is to elaborate a politics of tradition and heritage, and ‘the theme of “heritage” . . . cannot be thought apart from an already-there.’4

Elaborating a Politics of Tradition and Heritage in Digital Culture

There has been widespread debate as to whether ‘the digital’ marks a significant historical rupture or substantial reorganisation of technical and symbolic life.5 For Stiegler, the appearance of the internet, and subsequent widespread, ‘connective’6 digitisation, amounts to an undeniable ‘mutation . . . unified by the TCP-IP7 protocol [that] has manifestly changed the organizational set up of the program industries. And there is no doubt that this transformation of industrial technology, via the digital, renders new perspectives conceivable.’8 Furthermore, there are significant political stakes in these transformations. He writes:

With the advent of very advanced control technologies emerging from digitalization, and converging in a computational system of globally integrated production and consumption, new cultural, editing and programming industries appeared. What is new is that they are technologically linked by universal digital equivalence (the binary system) to telecommunications systems and to computers. [This] . . . constitutes the hyper-industrial epoch strictly speaking, dominated by the categorization of hyper-segmented ‘targets’ (‘surgically’ precise marketing organizing consumption) and by functioning in real time (production) through lean production and just in time (logistics). . . . The upheavals induced by digitalization [are] often compared to a ‘third industrial revolution’ (also called the ‘information society’ or, more recently, the ‘knowledge society’—the digital system permitting, on the side of industrial conception, the systematic mobilization of all knowledge in the service of innovation).9

For Stiegler, the hyper-industrial synchronisation of diverse memory communities into precise, targeted constituents of consumption is symptomatic of a very serious and extensive crisis.10 At an everyday level it produces banal homogeneity, ‘the de-composition of the I and the we (or the collapse of the I and the we),’11 which in turn results in widespread pseudo-individualism12 and ‘herdish’ behaviour. For Stiegler, we are currently embroiled in nothing less than a ‘war without rules,’ resulting in the ‘alienation of desire and of affects, where the weaponry is organized by marketing.’13 The hyper-industrial digital, manipulated by the programming industries, has reorganised ‘epigenetic memory of individual experience, which becomes transmissible through technical objects,’ the tertiary retentions (i.e., exteriorised mnemo-technical resources such as books, films and websites) that ‘condition [the] bond between I and the we.’14 In the context of this book, we could say that such transformations have qualitatively altered the access to the already-there, and its operating capacities, rendering them anticipatory and synchronised.

The hyper-industrial digital is also marked by a profound dis-adjustment in the compositional grafting of human and technics, amplifying the ‘fragility . . . of those who are born to prostheticity.’15 As technologies acquire increasing computational sophistication, they require less technical skill and knowledge on behalf of the human operator to make them work. Increased automatism deprives humanity of technical and social knowledge, as the exteriorised alterity within the human—digital technics, if you like—operate human life in the service of capitalist accumulation. The human, as composed technical being, is pulled out of place and time, continually adapting to accelerating technological innovations that render them perpetually de-skilled and disoriented. If all this sounds rather bleak and deterministic, it is important to remember that Stiegler’s diagnosis of the contemporary technical condition is a means to elaborate a pharmacological politics16—that is, a political programme attentive to the deeply poisonous aspects of digital technics and their curative potential.17

Long-Circuits and Short-Circuits

Transmission and generational exchange are central themes in Stiegler’s diagnosis of the problems created by the ‘extensive, more intensive and more complex’18 forms of calculation that define the hyper-industrial digital environment. In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010) Stiegler argues that ‘psychotechnological’ devices such as mobile phones, video games and the internet, as well as older media forms such as television, have ‘ravaged the mental and physical health of the entire population,’19 ...